I'm finally happy not to be a mother

One woman's journey from feeling grief-stricken to fulfilled

It was a rainy afternoon in February 2009 when it came to me: I was no longer a woman who hoped to be a mother one day, rather, I was childless. Sitting on the floor, I was unpacking cardboard boxes, having just moved into a grotty studio flat hurriedly rented following the stormy break-up with my ‘last chance to have a family’ guy.

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At 44, having tried, hoped, planned, waited, dreamed of and wished to be a mother since the age of 29, I realised I’d run out of road. And, it seemed, completely out of ideas about how the hell I was going to get through the rest of my life. The bleak and gritty view from the window, of traffic and high-rise flats, looked exactly as I felt.

I wish the me of today could have appeared to the me then, a ghost of the future, to say everything was going to be all right. To tell me that, one day, I’d emerge as content and purposeful. Or at least to give me a glimpse of a role model without the anchoring weight of motherhood, and a glimmer of hope that the future wasn’t the one feared, ending my days bitter and grouchy, surrounded only by cats.

How had this happened to me?

Early figures suggest that for those born in the 1970s, one in four won't have children. Many, like me, won’t have imagined this as their future. Analysis by Professor Renske Keizer at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands estimates 10% of women without children didn’t want them, 10% are childless due to infertility or medical issues, and a huge 80% are childless for other reasons. One estimate is there are 1.5 million women who are childless not by choice. When I found this out, my reaction was, where the hell are they all then? Amongst my family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, I didn’t know a single woman who had wanted to be a mother and it hadn’t worked out.

So how had this happened to me? A theme running through my early life was, ‘Children ruin your life’. I was an unplanned teenage pregnancy; my mother married when I was three to provide me with a ‘respectable home’ and thus I grew up in a tense and unhappy situation. Although Mum never actually said to me not to have children, she made it clear that an independent life outside the home was the way to go.

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Then there were the sex-education classes at school, where the fear of pregnancy hung over us like a ghastly spectre that would snatch away ‘our futures’. In fact, I had an abortion aged 20, terrified a pregnancy would be the end of everything I’d planned. I was part of the rising trend for women going to university and achieving financial independence, for ‘settling down’ happening later, aided by the Pill and safe abortion and with the back-up promise of IVF.

After my rocky childhood, I wasn’t sure I wanted children and told my husband-to-be so before I got married aged 26. However, over the next few years, the idea of ‘our’ children took hold and I was 29 when we started trying. I daydreamed about a delicate and artistic young boy who’d mooch around indoors making intricate models, and a bouncy and tomboyish little girl with a great curiosity about the world who’d make me laugh with her unique way of looking at things. I imagined my fridge covered in drawings brought home from school, and had a trunk full of fabric ready for the clothes I’d make them. I spent so long imagining my children that they were, and still are, real to me. Even all these years later, tears prick when I think about them.

But they were not to be. After a couple of years of trying, then medical tests, a doctor declared we had ‘unexplained infertility’ and that was that. I embarked on a massive period of what I call ‘babymania’, visiting every acupuncturist, herbalist, nutritionist, quack and healer in London, giving up this, taking up that – but nothing. My thirties ticked on and our marriage came under more and more strain, not least from the babymania. By the time IVF seemed like the next thing to try, our marriage had unravelled. We split up when I was 38.

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Gateway Women

Amazingly, I still thought I had time to find another partner and ‘do IVF’. I was in denial of the basic facts of my situation; I was 40 and had been trying to conceive since I was 29. Two failed relationships later, I found myself on that Tuesday afternoon and even my bulletproof hope couldn’t mask the fact that even if I were to meet someone new immediately, and get to know them well enough to proceed to IVF, it was too late.

I didn’t know about donor eggs then, which I’m quite glad about, as it meant I had to deal with my reality - which was that as a single, self-employed woman in her forties with no savings, there was no way I could afford fertility treatments, let alone afford to bring up a child on my own. It also ruled out adoption, not that it stopped so many people ‘helpfully’ suggesting it. Or they’d tell me some version of a ‘miracle baby story’ about so-and-so who’d had twins at 50.

In truth, I’d never just wanted just a ‘baby’, I’d wanted a family, with a loving partner and children. I was devastated in a way that felt impossible to get over. I remember one particularly bleak day when, feeling utterly purposeless, I lay on the floor of my flat, deciding to stay there until I could think of a compelling reason to stand up. I longed for distraction, but didn’t have the concentration even to read a book. It was excruciatingly painful to be around friends and family with children, even those I loved dearly.

I had no idea then that it was possible to grieve for something you’d never had. No one mentioned grief to me; not the doctors who medicated me for depression, nor the therapists I saw. It wasn’t until I was in my second year of training to become a psychotherapist, during a weekend seminar on grief that I made the connection. It was such a relief to have a name to put to it because, firstly, it meant I wasn’t going crazy, but also because, even though I wasn’t quite sure how, I knew that grief didn’t last forever and that therefore, some day, I’d come out of this.

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I started a blog, Gateway Women, where I wrote about how desperate and alone I felt. How angry and betrayed by life. How hard it was to find my way forward with the only role models for childless women either scary characters in Disney films or forever-spinsters like Ann Widdecombe. I wrote about the grief and I felt that if just one person in the world read it, and understood what I was experiencing, it would be a help.

I immediately starting getting emails and comments from all over the world. Within two months, I was persuaded to give my first public talk, and about six months after that I started the first Gateway Women group to see if women in the same situation as me could help each other through. For 10 extremely intimate and taboo-busting weeks, myself and a handful of other childless women worked through our grief, debunked negative social images of childlessness, unpacked our fears of growing old, the role of creativity in creating new dreams for our lives and, most of all, relaxed with relief at totally getting each other.

Since that first blog in 2011, Gateway Women has grown into a global network with free meet-ups in the UK, Ireland, Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, reaching almost two-million women worldwide. We have found ‘our tribe’ – our version of the ‘school gates’ with whom we have a life-changing experience in common.

Grieving the loss of the family I longed to have felt like walking through fire at the time, but it has left me with a bigger heart and greater compassion for all who struggle with being different in some way. It has allowed me to reopen my heart to the mothers and children around me. It has also given me back my purpose, which is enabling me to use my ‘mother’s heart’ in a completely unexpected way. I hoped that I would feel ‘better’ again one day, but what I never expected was that I would feel joyful, excited and fulfilled again. And that feels like a miracle story I can live with.

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